Exhibition Installation

 The past week has seen a laser-like focus on installing and celebrating Barry's exhibition at the Strathnaver Museum,  Betrayal and Loss.

We worked solidly for three days setting up and then celebrated at the opening on Friday night. I was available to do most anything - and together we put up the signage/lettering on the wall, formed and built 'the wave', built two display cabinets, and whilst Barry attached 100 boats to the wave, I set up the displays in the cabinets.

My main focus here is on the lettering and the story. After dismantling the heaviest of tables and moving it out of the way, we had a blank wall to work with.

We had had the lettering prepared in Australia; but sadly one of the measurements we had received was wrong and so Barry and I had to re-calculate whether the words would fit and how they might do so. We were little stress bunnies there for a while. 

Never having applied the vinyl lettering before either, we were working hard to make it as simple and as easy as possible for us to keep to straight lines. We worked out our interlinear distance, and ran painter's tape down the wall as various intervals.

The lettering came sandwiched between two sheets. Here I am gently removing the backing sheet. What remains is the sticky side of the letters. We had drawn the baseline of the lettering lines on the the cover sheet (underneath) so we could try to keep it straight. Did I mention stress?

We got the title on; and here B is pressing the lettering through the cover sheets to ensure it attaches firmly to the wall.

It was then my job to pull the cover sheet off really gently, to ensure the letters remain adhered to the wall. May I say that ys, ts, fs and js, along with commas, were most likely to lift. The things you learn.

The beginning of Row 1. B's ingenious approach to achieving straight lines was for us to cut each strip of tape down by the interlinear space after each row. That meant our pencil line on the cover sheet was aiming for the top of the tape, and we weren't attempting to go too far without having a landing spot to aim for. Experts of course would do a full row and not blink. B worked this out in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep for thinking through all the things we needed to do.

I discovered that the small post-it notes we had with us were pretty much equal in size to the space between words, so when our revised lines ended on a word, I would place a yellow sticky down and start applying the next word after it. Here, at the end of a sentence I double-spaced!

We had to work out where to cut the beautifully prepared lines of wording to fit the revised space, and the floor was the only place we could do it. Also, as the lines got longer (average about 2.3m) we had to take the backing sheet off on the floor as well.

But after a long day, it was done, and it looked wonderful.

The story that Barry was responding to is a terrible and sad tale of cruelty and injustice. Strathnaver was the site of some of the worst Clearances in Scotland - when folk were cleared from their land so that the owners could run sheep on the hills instead. Homes were burned and broken and people fled with little, and to nowhere. 

Barry's work focused on Letter 11 of Donald Macleod's book Gloomy Memories. This letter tells of people  who were pushed to the edges of a harsh and rocky coast and forced to become fisherfolk, even tho they knew nothing of fishing or going to sea. Nor could they afford safe boats. This letter describes how along one 30 mile stretch of coast, in one year alone,  more than 100 boats were destroyed.  When you think on how many families that would have affected in so many ways, it is utterly devastating.

On the night of the opening, we donated a First Edition of Gloomy Memories to the Museum for their collection, which they will have after the show is over.

It is difficult to photograph the show well; but here you get a sense of it. Barry will have more detail and information on his blog.

The exhibition is on for all of September, and we hope that folk enjoy and appreciate it. I think it is a beautiful and gentle response to such a horrendous story.